Environment

Sustainable fishing?
Old habits die hard and a lifetime habit of some sections of the MSM is to talk up the EU. In an ideal world the average person would get the facts from a news' source and make up their own mind. However, it's not like that. Honest reporting and unbiased reporting don't always come together. The EU has been a cause to support by both the BBC and the Guardian as well as a number of other subjects now broadly referred to as 'environmental', where hitherto these were simply common sense. The Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) is now getting a second look due to its mad, bad and stupid discard policy. This is related to quotas for species, so fish from another species, although netted and on the deck of the trawler often have to be thrown back.

The bulk of journalists now working for the BBC and Guardian would be too young to remember the upset caused by Edward Heath giving up the UK's fishing grounds. So to them the EU has been nothing but good; I know of several graduates who while at university have been told that the EU has 'prevented wars'. I know of one who tried to suggest that NATO played a role here and was given a very hard time by the lecturer; but such distortion no longer seems shocking following the University of East Anglia's climate research malpractice.

Since 1988, when the greatest scare the world has seen got under way, hundreds of billions of pounds have been poured into academic research projects designed not to test the CO2 warming thesis but to take it as a given fact, and to use computer models to make its impacts seem as scary as possible. The new global "carbon trading" market, already worth $126 billion a year, could soon be worth trillions. Governments, including our own, are calling for hundreds of billions more to be chucked into absurd "carbon-saving" energy schemes, with the cost to be met by all of us in soaring taxes and energy bills.

Australia has a political party called climate sceptics which refutes man-made climate change and has some interesting videos by farmers who are obviously passionate about improving their land and their environment but have been prevented from so doing by big government and, amazingly, so-called green initiatives. The conclusions are reminiscent of the rural decline in Britain whereby funds and infrastructure are removed, big agro-business is rewarded and the CAP has taken over from national initiatives. I wonder whether this will spread like the pirate parties? Here is one of their adverts:

Martin Hickman in the Independent provides a handy list of major companies and products using palm oil. This is often labelled simply as 'vegetable oil' and it is driving the destruction of the rainforests, displacing native people and threatening the survival of the orangutan. It is present in dozens of Britain's leading grocery brands. So you could boycott these products unless a sustainable palm oil was used.

Kellogg's (US) Uses palm oil in 50 products, mostly cereal bars but also cereals such as Special K and Crunchy Nut, where it binds together clusters. Does not buy sustainable palm oil.

The New Left are a combination of political Islam, climate change Armageddonists, the far Left, hard-line Human Rightists and muddled anti-globalists/ supranationalists (world domination for Guardian readers). You have to agree with them totally, else you are excluded, and the parts of their views you agree with may be trashed in the public mind by association.

You can be anti-war, anti-torture, anti-rendition but still think that ex-Guantanamo prisoners should not be given hero status and invitations to speak at conventions. Some are pretty harmless fellow travellers who would a liability as fighters, some may be people who have been passed to the Americans in order to gain money and punish an enemy but there are also those who are dangerous terrorists.